CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT of Corrections chief James Gomez has much to answer for in response to shocking reports that Corcoran State Prison guards have staged barbaric gladiator battles among inmates and have shot more than 50 convicts -- seven fatally -- when they failed to quit fighting when ordered.

To make matters worse, top corrections officials were cynically citing increased prison violence to support requests for additional billions of dollars in state funding at the same time guards were pitting convicts against each other in hand-to-hand combat and betting on the outcomes.

Chronicle staff writer Reynolds Holding reported this week that when two disillusioned and disgusted corrections officers reported circumstances of the staged fights and shootings to the FBI, the Department of Corrections tried to block the investigation. In one bizarre incident, corrections personnel pursued a guard and an FBI agent in a 45-mile high-speed chase in a failed effort to stop the guard from passing records of activities at Corcoran to federal officials.

Asked to respond to the story, Corrections Department spokesman Tipton C. Kindel replied: "All of these allegations are under investigation by the department, and the FBI has had much of this under investigation since 1994. Yet they still have come to no conclusions."

After two years of investigating, it is high time the FBI told the public the truth about what is going on in Corcoran, known as one of the nation's most violent prisons.

The reports of the disgraceful official behavior at Corcoran, in Kings County, make clear the need for a probe of the entire prison system to determine what is going on at the state's other 31 lockups.

As California's top correctional official, James Gomez owes the public a prompt and detailed explanation about conditions at Corcoran, how they got that way and what he is doing to fix them, if anything.

If he cannot come up with immediate and satisfactory answers, Gomez should be fired and replaced by someone who can.